Thursday, June 6, 2013

Odd and Unusual!

We've created a new, highly selective little section in the bookshop called Odd and Unusual. (You can find it under the sign of the yellow and blue eyed cat...). If you're an odd and unusual person yourself, or have aspirations in that direction, you might have some fun with the books we're adding to these shelves!

And I've just added one of my favorite odd and unusually good novels to this section. The book is titled The Raw Shark Texts, by a young British writer named Steven Hall, published back in 2007. To tell you about the book, I can't do any better than to crib from a review of the book from the Washington Post by Tyler Knox, who clearly enjoyed the shark as much as I did:

"The star of Steven Hall's rousingly inventive
The Raw Shark Texts is its villain -- always a good sign in a
thriller. Raymond Chandler famously said, "When in doubt, have a man
come through a door with a gun in his hand." Hall one-ups Chandler by
sending in a shark. But not just any shark, a conceptual shark called a
Ludovician, which swims in a current of words and ideas and feeds on
memory and sense of self. Every time the Ludovician makes an appearance,
Hall's novel jolts to life.

Eric Sanderson gasps awake one day
to find his memory missing. As Eric struggles to forge a bland and
static life, a series of letters, apparently from his self before the
memory loss, the so-called First Eric, warns him of the conceptual shark
that, with a vengeance as unmotivated as Iago's, is determined to eat
Eric's memory over and over....Second Eric doesn't buy it
until he spies the figure of a shark within the white noise of his
television...

It isn't long before Eric is on the run, dodging the memory eater and
searching for the strange Dr. Fidorous, who might just be able to get
the damn shark off his tail. At this point the novel takes on the cloak
of your typical thriller: a man on the run, aided by a great-looking
waif with a killer smile and a bomb in her pocket. Oh, yeah, and there's
a cat....More compelling
are the journals written by First Eric, the raw texts of the title,
that give glimpses of Eric's romance with Clio, the love of his life,
who was killed in a tragic accident off the coast of Greece.

...Even as Hall takes great delight in showing off the
details of his world with all kinds of loopy names and textual tricks
-- including one terrific visual sequence where the terrifying nature
of the shark is made real -- his methods almost always serve the
purpose of the story. And for a first novelist, Hall has a nice way of
hiding telling details until the end of a sentence or a scene, like the
stinger at the end of a scorpion's tail.

It's all a lot of fun,
yet there is also a surprising emotional resonance in seeing Second
Eric, like Beckett's Krapp with his tapes, reading and rereading First
Eric's journals as he obsesses over the experiences that the Ludovician
has chomped out of his head. And to hear Second Eric's voice take on the
snap of his predecessor's is especially satisfying.

Best of all,
there is the shark itself, wily and relentless, with its chilling eye
and gaping maw, hungry for memory.."